Furniture glides provide for adjustment of tables or other pieces of furniture having more than 3 legs. Such furniture supports may be adjustable either manually or automatically. In U.S. Pat. No. 4,798,359, one style of automatically adjustable furniture glide is shown and described. That style includes wedge ramped upper and lower members with a coil spring biased therebetween and retained together by an elongate bolt and a top mounting nut. The support provides height adjustment by allowing the upper ramp member to rotate with respect to the lower ramp member with the tops of the ramps sliding across one another. The lower member outwardly with respect to the upper member while allowing both members to rotate on the bolt or stud mounting that is threaded into the furniture or table leg. This furniture glide has been unique in the industry in allowing the upper ramp member to rotate with respect to the mounting bolt or stud. In all other manually self-adjusting furniture glides known to applicant, an upper member is solidly connected to the bolt or threaded stud so that when the stud is fully threaded into a furniture or table leg, the upper member of the furniture glide will also no longer turn. In such furniture glides it is the lower member that rotates to ramp up or down with respect to the upper member and make up any unevenness in the lengths of the respective furniture or table legs. Having the lower ramp member rotate while adjusting the height of the table glide may cause swirl or other marks to appear on the floor or other surface on which the table is positioned, especially if there is debris between the floor and bottom member. In the design shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,798,359, the bottom member does not necessarily have to rotate since both members are free to rotate with respect to the bolt or stud. While this provides for superior adjustability, the independent rotatability of the upper and lower ramp members with respect to the bolt or stud means that such a furniture glide cannot be tightened or loosened manually to the extent that the design having the upper member fixed to the stud can be.
While the freely rotatable type of furniture glide may have its bolt or stud securely mounted to a piece of furniture or table leg by use of a screw driver, allen wrench, etc. in the field, such simple tools may not be readily available, even if they are originally packaged with the table supports. The fixed type of mechanically ramped self-adjusting furniture glide is more easily hand turnable or mountable on a furniture or table leg or the like by finger manipulation of the larger upper ramp member since it is solidly mounted to the threaded mounting.
A need has developed for an improved ramp-type mechanical self-adjusting furniture glide that continues to provide the advantages of rotatability between the upper ramp member and the threaded mounting bolt or stud while also providing ease of manual or finger controlled threading of the furniture glide both onto and off of a furniture leg, table leg or the like, without the necessity of using hand tools.
It is an object of the present invention, generally stated, to provide a new and improved self-adjusting furniture glide. It is a further object of the present invention to provide an improved self-adjusting mechanically acting furniture glide that may be easily mounted on and removed from a furniture or table leg by the use of hand or finger manipulation without the use of hand tools.